Why ruby on rails?

[thomosmax]

Why developers like ruby on rails and how it is better then PHP and other developing languages?

[prakashsharmas]

Ruby on Rails is a framework used for ruby programming and is written in ruby language. It is commonly known as RoR.....

[Foxfire]

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[Akshay_M]

As others have said Ruby is a programming language (and could be compared and contrasted with Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp, Java, PHP, Prolog, Erlang, Basic, and so forth).

As for "Ruby and Rails" there are two possibilities. One is that you misheard someone saying "Ruby *on* Rails". The other is that you heard correctly. I'll start with Ruby on Rails, since that will allow me to explain the other.

Ruby on Rails is a development framework, and is often just called "Rails" since the full name is a mouthful. If you've never done web development or any other sort of programming, that might not mean anything to you. A short explanation of a framework might be: a set of programming tools specially designed to make a certain sort of programming project easier and faster and better. Rails is written in Ruby, but gives you a lot of reusable pieces to help you build a web site or application much faster and more easily, pieces you don't have to write yourself, and can simply configure and use for your project. Furthermore, they are pieces that have been very thoroughly tested, so they are much more robust than if you wrote them yourself. You *could* just write your app or site in Ruby, but you'd have a lot more work to do, and a lot of things that you'd have to figure out if you didn't use Rails or another framework, like Sinatra.

Ruby was created around the same time that Perl and PHP were created, but it never caught on very much outside of Japan until David Heinemeier Hansson created Rails around 2004-2005. He released a video showing how easy development could be with Rails, and it caught on very quickly, bringing Ruby a lot of attention and showing the world what a well-designed language it is.

Because Rails was the cause of Ruby's fame, a lot of people don't know the difference between them, and a huge portion of people who use Ruby use Rails, or at least started using Ruby because of Rails. Because of this, they are often spoken of together. So (for instance) a recruiter might ask you "how much experience do you have with Ruby and Rails?". In this sentence "Ruby and Rails" are not one thing, but two things. However they're two very closely associated things. It would be a little awkward to say "Ruby and Ruby on Rails", so "Ruby and Rails" makes sense. This hypothetical recruiter might not want to just ask about one or the other since they may be interested in your ability to fill a Rails developer position, but they also want to know that you know about the underlying Ruby language, and make sure you're not someone who has simply dabbled in Rails without really understanding Ruby very well, since it is the foundation of Rails, and a good Rails developer needs to know Ruby well and be comfortable using it.